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Thursday, March 05, 2009

Dry questions this time! This set of questions is picked randomly from previous years' UTPT Sci-Tech Quiz, by Ravi, Rohan and Madhu. Happy cracking..

1. There is a small metal flap at the nose of the modern day spacecraft called the "spoiler". If the spacecraft started to reenter nose first (another stable reentry attitude for the capsule), airflow over the "spoiler" would flip the spacecraft around to the proper, heatshield-first reentry attitude, a technique called ‘________‘, Due to the apparent nature of flight of the spacecraft. During reentry, the astronaut would experience about 4 g-forces. What is ________ ?

2. The ______ , or more commonly known as the "teacher-expectancy effect" refers to situations in which students perform better than other students simply because they are expected to do so. The ________ effect requires a student to internalise the expectations of their superiors.The effect is named after George Bernard Shaw's play _______, in which a professor makes a bet that he can teach a poor flower girl to speak and act like an upper-class lady, and is successful. ID ________ .

3. According to The Hackers Dictionary of Computer Jargon this term is used to describe hardware, it denotes willingness to compute or pass data in either {big-endian} or {little-endian} format (depending, presumably, on a {mode bit} somewhere). What term?

4. Many possible reasons have been suggested for this behavior. First, it has been observed that X are more likely to _______ when they are in groups, suggesting that it is done for social reasons, such as an assertion of dominance over another, courting a mate or warning of a danger. It is also possible that the loud "smack" is useful for stunning or scaring prey. Others have suggested that it may aid breathing in rough environment. Another widely accepted possible reason is to remove parasites from the skin. What Behavior?

5. __________ is believed to be the work of Johann Bernoulli since X, a nobleman, paid Bernoulli a retainer of 300 francs per year to tell him of his discoveries and to solve problems he had. When X published his book, he gave due credit to Bernoulli and, not wishing to take credit for any of the mathematics in the book, he published the work anonymously. Bernoulli, who was known for being extremely jealous, claimed to be the author of the entire work, and until recently, it was believed to be so. Nevertheless, _______ was named after X, who never claimed to have invented it in the first place. _______ ?

6. Debugging features such as observation registers and shadow scan can, upon failure detection, dump the circuit’s state. However, even this scenario has latency. Large, pipelined designs usually require several cycles before the clock can be stopped and the state dumped. This means that, even in the best cases, the state will change before it’s dumped.

To solve this problem physical chemistry was brought in –

When the test system detects an error in unit A, a signal alerts special equipment to add water to a ________ sample. Exactly 1.12 seconds before the water is added, the _____ dissolves. This action triggers the sending of a signal, which travels to unit B and stops its clock after a programmable number of cycles. The 1 s between the addition of water and the _______’s dissolution is far longer than the error latency. This way the system crash is averted. What is all this about?

7.Douglas B. Lenat is the CEO of Cycorp, Inc. of Austin, Texas, and has been a prominent researcher in artificial intelligence, especially machine learning , knowledge representation, blackboard systems, .He has also worked in military simulations and published a critique of conventional random-mutation Darwinism.Lenat's quest, in the Cyc project, to build the basis of a general artificial intelligence by manually representing knowledge in the formal language, CycL, has not been without its critics, among them many are members of the MIT hacker culture. It is perhaps for this reason that “X" is said to be measured in microlenats, the lenat being considered too large for practical use.